Balancer Maxis May 2023 Update

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During the month of May, we closely followed work with all teams involved in the Polygon zkEVM deployment. After the Safe UI was restored, the contract deployment has begun and handed off to the UI/infrastructure teams. With these advancements, we are excited to offer our users a secure and efficient experience on the zkEVM network, expect the marketing campaign drop anytime soon!

Another exciting development was finally seeing cross-chain gauge boosts in collaboration with LayerZero. Maxis have been acting as governance facilitators to Balancer and LayerZero contributors, who have recently completed development and testing of bridging veBAL boosts cross chain. [BIP-308] was the final permission to the DAO multisig to call functions on LayerZero’s contracts, so we should be seeing 2,5x boosts coming to L2s this month.

Building toward more automation and decentralization, Mimic was authorized back in Nov’22 to develop a fee collector for the DAO (for reference, see [BIP-115]). Maxis have conducted initial tests with them in Arbitrum, following the proposal [BIP-294] for the authorization for the smart vaults to start operations there. Tests on other networks are now beginning. This represents mitigation of risk and liability for everyone involved in the Balancer ecosystem, and a great step towards the vision of a fully progressed decentralized protocol.

A partnership with CowSwap was also proposed by the Maxis on [BIP-295], aiming for a fee discount to increase non-toxic flow through Balancer pools. We expect there will be an increase of swap fees, but if not, it would at least grow the DEX marketshare on Ethereum. Since most of our protocol fees are mainly generated by yield, this experiment shouldn’t hurt us even if it fails, nonetheless the results will be monitored and reported accordingly.

Several pools supported by Maxis bizdev team also initiated emissions in May, including Binance wbETH/wstETH on Mainnet and a lot of action on Arbitrum (bb-a-USD, wstETH/bb-a-wETH and [wstETH/bb-a-wETH BPT]/bb-a-USD). Additionally, we are excited to see Gyroscope’s stMATIC/wMATIC E-CLP picking up great usage - perhaps another fundamental growth pillar? :thinking:

Here are the bullet point updates for May. For reference, please review [BIP-230] which funded the Balancer Maxis for Q2/2023.

  • Multisig Management

    • Maxis granted permission to add approved gauges on Gnosis and zkSync (TBD)
    • Additional ETH for gas spendings, due to general increase in prices. A Dune dashboard was commissioned to observe this usage.
    • Two protocol fee distributions took place for a total of $954k (voting incentives, Treasury, veBAL). Fees and core pool incentives (BIP-19) detailed stats here.
    • Working together with the BLabs data team to better understand fee-flows and improve core pools vote incentive attribution.
    • Worked with BLabs to move to the new balancer-deployments repo, and continued work on bal_addresses to eventually become an easy-to-use, multi-language source of truth for DAO addresses.
    • Automation of multisig and regular operations continues - see the Maxi github for more info.

  • Governance

    • [RFC] updates on Arbitrum incentives proposal to emit directly on the pools
    • [BIP-283] veBAL fees updates to Aave V3 (bb-a-USD)
    • [BIP-288] Disable last generation pool factories
    • [BIP-292] Killed the steaked APE gauge, due to Tessera’s sunsetting
    • [BIP-300] Snapshot settings changed to Weighted Voting, specially to accommodate veBAL wrappers
    • Four out of the six Maxis are active delegates.

  • User/Project Support

    • Community contributors new framework for supporting Balancer users alongside tech teams (BLabs and frontend).
    • Plenty of tokens and pool whitelisting
    • Telegram chats always busy
    • Discord #partnership channel busy with projects wanting to learn more about Balancer. Is it Balancer season yet? Thanks @Gleb for keeping track.

  • Community

    • Coordinape’s April epoch ran with 15 participants, focused on contributors engaged with the daily activities within the community;
    • Balancer “Anti Scam Initiative” by Dubstard.
    • “The Balancer Report” weekly newsletter moved to Medium by @Gleb and @Cosme;
    • Discord server had a little hiccup due to a hack on a contributors account. Thankfully, no damage was done. Kudos @Dubstard for assisting us with Discord safety.
    • Multiple marketing collabs with BeethovenX (Twitter threads, designs, AMAs etc.) following the transition from Orb as the new official marketing SP.
    • Community contributors marketing the Grants program;

  • DAO Dev Work

  • Record Keeping

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